Friday, June 27, 2014

In legend, the ankou is a personification of death from Breton and Cornish folklore, a kind of dark psychopomp.But the ankou in the Pathfinder game is
a much more decidedly fey and murderous creature (courtesy of Pathfinder #36: Sound of a Thousand Screams).Its party trick is creating up to four
shadowy duplicates to fight alongside it.As instruments of their fey lords’ dark wills, ankous terrify other
fey—no wonder, since their claws function as cold iron weapons—and nasty
spell-like abilities like prismatic spray
and circle of death only add to the
body count.

All those special abilities mean the Bestiary 4 entry doesn't have the room for all the juicy flavor
tidbits from the original: “an ankou slumbers in a cocoon of darkness”...“the
only words they can utter are those whispered telepathically into the victim’s
ear an instant before death, and those words are spoken in the voice of the one
who sent the killer”…“one of these assassins might be told to kill the victim
many times over—murdering its target, waiting for its connection to the First
World to reform it, and then killing it again.”[For the unfamiliar, this last bit is a reference to the
regenerative powers of Golarion’s fey realm.]

One final note is that each ankou serves a different fey
lord. So there’s no reason that every ankou has to look just like the winged
skeletal shadow-horror in the books.I imagine the progenitor of the quickling race might fashion his ankou
to look like a knife-covered cutpurse, rail-thin despite its Large size.A fey lord of harvest might have a pumpkin-like
monstrosity, while a spirit of the crossroads might employ a crow-monster or a
hanged man with wings made of iron and rotted ropes.Then again, winged skeletal shadow-horrors that nest in
cocoons of darkness do have a certain primal appeal, and might be symbols of
terror throughout the fey realms no matter who they serve.

While exploring an
undocumented cavern, adventurers come upon a slumbering ankou.It attacks them upon waking and pursues
them through the dungeon as best it can.If the party escapes the cavern complex it leaves them be, unless it
hears them singing or they grievously wound it (reduce it to 25% of its hit
points), in which case it retreats to plot its revenge—which it will enact no
matter how far they go.If the
adventurers kill the ankou, they are not out of the woods, for the
shadow-beast’s death, however, temporary, draws the eyes of its fey master upon
them.

Duke Summer’s wrath
is all the more terrible for its rarity, descending almost without warning like
a summer storm.On a mission to
save the world, a faerie agent and her mortal adventuring allies are taking a
shortcut through Summer’s realm when they break one of his strictures.Insensible to reason in the face of
this flouting of his authority, he sends an ankou after the party, declaring,
“And as I am Summer, the world may burn.”

Other creatures fear
cold iron claws, including demons and night hags.A faerie lord allies with adventurers to take down their
mutual enemy, a particularly powerful and troublesome night hag.Careful listeners will note that he
promises them the obedient services of the beast “until the night hag has well
and truly perished”…with not a word about what comes after.

—Pathfinder #36 80–81
& Pathfinder Bestiary 4 10

Work and life has me a bit slow to reply to reader comments
(and I simply can't give everyone the props they deserve) but I do appreciate
all of you who are weighing in despite these comparatively new/unfamiliar
monsters.

Just a heads-up: With July 4th almost here, I’m going to be
taking a vacation to do some traveling.I’m debating posting next week and almost definitely will not be posting the week after.So if you don’t see your daily entry
during the next fortnight, that’s what’s up.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

I love the animal lord.It’s a concept that is richly represented in folklore and
fiction (especially, my gut tells me, short fiction, but I may be making that
up.) It makes sense in the game—in
a world suffused with divine magic and nature deities (not to mention an
overabundance of super- and supernatural predators), surely animals need their
champions.And around the gaming
table in your living room, it’s an easy way to transport players into a more
mystical realm.PCs used to
tangling in the grimdark milieu of slavers, daemons, and seugathi may find encounters
with Seamus O’Finnegan, Leprechaun for Hire, too twee to take seriously.But when the Lord of Owls calls a
meeting at the Stone Table, you don’t ignore that invitation.

I also love this excerpt from the Bestiary 3 description:

[W]hen an extant
animal lord strays from its charge or otherwise fails, the force that created
it might create a replacement to send against the fallen animal lord to
challenge it in a combat to the death, with the victor claiming the right to
rule or a chance at redemption.

Those are stakes.To an animal lord, a successor
appearing unasked-for is the ultimate insult.I want PCs in the middle of that fight, and I don’t much care which side they take.

That said, I’m very willing to go further than the standard
description in the Bestiary 3,
especially for a more mythic or high-level campaign.For instance, I can easily picture an entire nation of leopard lords (or at least a
ruling class or family composed of them, à laMarvel’s Black Panther).That might explain, for instance, why a province of hunters
hasn't been overrun by the magocracy next door, or why explorers have never
returned from a particular deadly savannah.In some campaigns, “There can be only one” is exactly the
story you want to tell, but the second I need a race of crocodile lords I’ll
throw that rule out the window…

The Leopard Kingdom
is no poetic name—the nation’s ruling clan is composed entirely of leopard
lords.They tolerate travelers in
their domain along the Chopana River, as it is the fastest way to get men and
arms to the Protean Storm and the war against Chaos raging there.But any foreigner who tries to travel
more than 15 miles from the river will receive a stern, likely lethal visit
from one of these shapechanging rangers and her charmed companions.

Takar was a god once,
back before an asteroid drove his people to near-extinction.Now he is not even a deity, just a
dinosaur lord who is born, matures, ages, dies, and is born again in an endless
cycle of reincarnation.He still
watches over his charges, though.In his current incarnation as a monk who can take the form of a
stegosaurus, he works to save a hidden valley of pterosaurs, stegosaurs,
ceratosaurs, and awakenedparasaurolophuses from drow
exploitation.

Verdun was once the
wolf lord, bearing the token of a savage nature deity.Then he was injured while under a curse
that trapped him in wolf form.He
was found by a blacksmith and nursed back to health, and the experience caused
him to reëvaluate everything he knew about humanity.After the curse was broken, time spent in the form of a
man—first learning to read and play music, then poring through old tomes and
swapping tales with bards—exposed him to tales of his predecessors, whose
bloody work had undone human progress at crucial junctions in history for
centuries. Verdun had had
enough.He renounced his heritage
and has spent the past 80 years as far from the woods as possible.Now his savage god has sent a new wolf
lord to kill him, an assassin who also recruits a team of adventurers to help
him do the job.But when Verdun
catches wind of this, he plays on the adventurers’ sympathies to get them to
switch sides.(And if that doesn't
work, he’ll try money.Lots of money.He is a wolf, after all.)

Now I want to see the adventures of Seamus O’Finnegan,
Leprechaun for Hire.

Speaking of folklore and fiction, you may remember I veered into literary criticism last Thursday, because I’d encountered a series (and an
author) too compelling not to discuss.The bad news is, it turns out the two books that sparked my very mixed
review represented him at the height of his powers.Also in my stack of library audiobooks was the first book in
his most well-known series, and it is—and I mean this without malice—a crime
against fiction.Avoid at all
costs.

Also: I MISSED FREE RPG DAY.Completely spaced.I normally go to the comic/game store right after my radio show, but I
took artisticlicensetokill to the zoo and completely
missed it.

I don’t usually ask stuff of you guys, but if any of you are
willing to part with your Pathfinder Free RPG Day module, I know a certain
blogger who is very sad he doesn’t have a copy.I wouldn't say no to any Free RPG Day products with Mage or
Star Wars the cover either.[Edit: I just got an email from the
professional and prompt Katina Mathieson
at Paizo and she says I can buy the Pathfinder module legit on July 1.Crisis averted!]

(Also, though I’ve mentioned this before and had nary a
nibble, I am always looking for issues of Dungeon
from the 1e and 2e years.If you
have some that need a good home, holler at me and we’ll work something out.)

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Ah, the androsphinx.Supercilious and disdainful of physicality, Low Libido androsphinxes form
the last corner of the dysfunctional sphinx love rhombus—wait, no,
pentagram—joining the Princess gynosphinx, “Nice Guy” Criosphinx, Rapist
heiracosphinx, and Necrophagous cynosphinx (courtesy of Pathfinder Adventure Path #82: Secrets of the Sphinx).Seriously, Dan Savage should be writing
this entry, not me.

I’ve already said most of what I wanted to say about
sphinxes here.That said, a few more
notes for role-playing the male variety…If you took philosophy in college, now’s your chance to use it.(I didn’t; I took religion, which at my
college was philosophy, semiotics, and hermeneutics with a blood sacrifice
chaser.)Rather than engage in riddle
play, male sphinxes love philosophical debates, so in the back of your mind I
think you should assign a school of thought (fantastic or otherwise) to each of
your androsphinxes, so you know through what lens they view the world and frame
their answers.

The following androsphinxes attempt to avoid the usual
tomb/temple/mountain pass/necropolis locales in favor of locations more in
keeping with their studies, but rest assured most of these magical beasts still
guard relics, ruins, and holy sites all over the desert.

Androsphinx Bartumyubus
is a political philosopher, and his convictions have him secretly pulling the
strings of several Cyan Crescent communities, each one enacting a different
form of utopian government.Unfortunately and despite his goodly intentions, the firmness of his
convictions and his geographic distance from his policies’ effects leave him
unable to process the very real harm he is doing to the people under his
influence.

Ramset IV prefers a
sun-baked cliff overlooking the water to an empty desert.There he collects stories about the
laws and customs of undersea nations (when not composing sestinas). Given that he demands knowledge before
he offers any, novice travelers are discouraged from calling upon
him…especially since the uneven rocky slope he dwells upon makes his roars
particularly lethal.

Drawn in by the
arguments of a kyton, former Stoic scholar Blackwing has begun to fall
under the outsider’s rhetorical spell.Any advice the sphinx gives now comes laced with danger, as he has
become convinced of the cleansing clarity that comes from facing danger and
pain.Should adventurers return
his way again after more than six months have passed, they will find a
surgically altered beast who is unknowingly giving more and more of himself
over to the fiend with every surgery.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3
251

I should note that Mythic
Adventures has a mythic (albeit gyno-) sphinx.And (as I’ve mentioned before) Jonathan H. Keith has a
chapter on sphinxes in Mythical Monsters
Revisited.Finally, in “basic”
D&D male sphinxes had access to magic-user (wizard) spells while female
sphinxes had access to clerical spells.You might want to emulate a similar divide if you decide to give your
sphinxes class levels…

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

If you ever wonder how committed Golarion’s designers are to
genre bending, look no further than the Inner
Sea Bestiary, where the very first monster is the android.Clearly this is not your father’s
fantasy role-playing.

(…Except it is, because even the most cursory review of the
pulp forebears of Pathfinder and the world’s oldest role-playing game (once again
I’ll plug Tim Callahan and Mordicai Knode’s Advanced Readings in “Dungeons & Dragons” series) reveals that fantasy
worldbuilders of the past were plenty comfortable mixing lasers, robots, and
aliens in with their sword & sorcery. The Chinese wall separating fantasy and sci-fi is largely a recent
(1980s?) invention…albeit one that feels older than it is (probably because
Tolkien’s discomfort with modernity gave this separation a certain historical
heft).)

Anyway, androids make great NPCs and even great player
characters.Their stat bonuses and
penalties line up exactly how you’d suspect, the nanite surge is a nice special
ability with the potential for facilitating some really cinematic/heroic
moments, and blue circuitry is always cool.

The big question is how prevalent you want your androids to
be and how much they have to hide (or not) to fit in—and what the consequences
are when they don’t.They might be
rare beings who come from only one region, as in Golarion, or they might be as
common as droids (or at least Rodians) in Star Wars.As always, it’s up to you.

An android joins a
new adventuring party incognito, hiding his circuitry beneath sailor’s
tattoos and blaming his stilted manner on his “foreign” heritage and years away
at sea.Unfortunately, one of his
old shipmates saw the android use his nanite surge to rescue a comrade during a
boarding action, and now he stalks the android, hoping to carve off a limb to
sell to a wealthy buyer for study.

Androids in Pellerin
may look alike, but their characters vary widely depending on their mother
forge’s programming.Promise
Keepers keep their race a secret while toiling to unearth a crashed alien
vessel.The Tribe of Rule has
discovered the Plane of Law; craving the approval of the axiomites, they have
begun creating inevitable-like robots of their own. The Midwives bring organic
creatures back to their home forge to be rendered and reconstructed (“reborn”)
into cyborgs.Finally, every
Bladeborn has a list imprinted within its operating code.Who knows what the list was originally
for, but centuries of bit rot have convinced the Bladeborn that this list is a
hit list, and everyone named on it must die.

The Far Home of the
Elves is not some mystical isle or magical realm, as is often supposed, but
another planet entirely.Moreover
the elven race, long rumored to be in a sort of shambolic decline, is actually
nearly extinct.Most “elves” one
meets on the road are androids vat-grown to serve as interlocutors between real
elves and the outside world.The
charade has been going on so long that many common stereotypes of elves—their
legendary aloofness and reputation for rune magic, for instance—are actually just
side affects of android silicon and circuitry.

—Inner Sea Bestiary
3

Numeria: Land of
Fallen Stars arrived at the close of last week, and since a) I was excited
for it and b) it had caused a debate on these very pages, I raced through
it.Golarion fans will be
pleased—it has everything you expect: a short gazetteer; some technological
hazards up to and including radiation, parasitic nanite infestations, gray goo,
and mysterious fluids that will have you rolling on a pretty scary random
results table; major organizations and important adventure sites; and 18 pages
of monsters.

That said, if you’re not
a Golarion fan, this book doesn’t drop quite as effortlessly into a generic campaign
the way, say, Isles of the Shackles
or Into the Darklands might.In part this is because it bridges
several other Pathfinder publications. Certain key monsters (androids and gearsmen in particular) appear
not in this book but in the Inner Sea
Bestiary; we’ll be getting a closer look some of Numeria’s cities in future
Pathfinder Adventure Path issues; and
the juicy my-character-gets-a-jetpack bits are coming in the Technology Guide.So the full pleasure and potential of
this book is likely to unfold in stages from August to January.

My advice for fence-sitters: Browse it in your local game
store.Check out the Numerian
Fluids Side Effects table, the robot and mutant-filled Bestiary, and the
really, really pleasing Adventure Sites section on pages 34–43.That should tell you everything you
need to know, and you’ll be supporting your brick-and-mortar retailer to boot.

In the alraune’s case, that lure is seductive indeed: a
beautiful woman.Or man.Or whatever—it can reform its pistil into
the shape of whatever it thinks its victims (whom it has scoped out in advance via
commune with nature) will desire.

And those stats! CR 13, AC 27, 19 Hit Dice, Melee +20, Int
10, Wis 17, Speed 40 ft. (not to
mention special and spell-like abilities)!Normally when we talk about
plant monsters we talk about them in terms of side quests, hazards, and random
encounters…but there’s no reason an alraune can't be the main antagonist for an
entire adventure arc.With four
languages under their bulbs, they’re more articulate than the party barbarian
and they can outrun the party paladin without any effort.They even “convince foes to dig their own graves [emphasis mine] and
bury themselves” prior to feeding!Forget side trek…the alraune might as well be listed after the atomie
under “Audrey III.”

The Forest of Doon is
rumored to be haunted by dryads and harpies, as few who go in ever return,
and sometimes shrieking can be heard at odd hours.Actually, all the “dryad” sightings are of the same alraune
using different lures.The shrieks
are her cries of frustrating at being thwarted.Should prey ever escape her grasp (a rare occurrence), she
uproots herself and chases after her victim on great thorny vine legs,
screaming in outrage the entire time.

An alraune and a
vouivre have embarked on a rather unorthodox lover affair, conducted almost
entirely through their respective humanoid lures.Of course, their shared lust for blood far outpaces any
lusts of a physical nature.

Covered in thorns,
rose elves are practically more plant than elf; indeed, they are the ones who
pioneered the adoption of plant animal companions (see the Advanced Race Guide).The
subrace’s dark secret is that they are not ruled by their fellow elves at all,
but rather by alraune botaniarchs.Most rose elves are druids or sorcerers, but a few enchanters are always
needed to help lure more willing victims to their queens.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3
13

I tried to tackle the alraune over a year ago at the request
of a reader, but that didn’t end up working out and I never got back to
it.Apologies, Sincubus!

My sister-in-law called my show “weird” this weekend.Which it was, because it was done
completely on the fly and with five random DJs hanging out in the booth with
me.Also, the stream ripper is
nearly 10 minutes ahead, so the file has dead air at the start and then cuts
off early.Nevertheless, if you’re
loyal and pure of heart, this show is for you.

(Yeah, there’s eight minutes of
dead air at the front. That’s what the fast-forward slider is for.If the feed skips, Save As an mp3 and
enjoy in iTunes. Link good till
Friday, 6/27, at midnight.)

Friday, June 20, 2014

If you couldn’t tell from the string of L’s, R’s, CH’s, and
A’s, the alpluachra is a newtlike faerie from Irish folktales.Should it catch you sleeping by the river,
it promptly slithers down your throat.There it becomes a parasite, eating all the food you consume and slowly
starving you to death unless you douse it with salt. Charming, right?

(I can easily imagine how tales of the alpluachra got
started.Having failed to get St.
Patrick to drive out the newts along with the snakes and frogs, we Irish apparently
just decided to badmouth and scapegoat them instead.A bunch of herpetophobes, we are.)

The alpluachra is a great nod to folklore, but it's not
really a high-adventure kind of encounter…more like an incidental happening at
a stop along the road, or a solo encounter for one player when the rest of the
group is absent.Killing an
alpluachra is a nice way to earn some cred with the locals, to be later cashed
in for rumors or favors.And it’s
just a nice way for new adventurers to begin engaging with the magical
world.

The hard part is spotting the alpluachra before it implants
or diagnosing soon it after.Otherwise the fey could quietly haunt its victim for weeks without him
or her knowing.Then again, if a
parasitized PC drinks the wrong potion, the effects could be immediately amusing
and/or dramatic.(Let’s just say
it’s a good thing that the enlarge person
spell description specifies that it only works on humanoids.)

And then there’s the matter of alpluachras speaking not
Sylvan, like most fey, but the dark tongue of Aklo instead…

An alpluachra haunts
the common room of a riverside taphouse.So much time spent in the gullets of barge workers has
gotten it addicted to pipeweed.If
its current host doesn't partake, it will sneak out late at night to pilfer
unfinished cigarillos and perhaps find a new throat in which to dwell—which may
afford adventurers extra opportunities to spot the fey.

A dwarf elder is
starving to death.An elf
armchair physician suspects an alpluachra, rightly assuming most dwarven
caregivers would be unfamiliar with the woodland fey.If adventurers can convince the dwarf to try the saltwater
cure, they may both save his life and usher in a thawing
in dwarf-elf relations…assuming the cure doesn’t kill him.

A leprechaun hears a
group of adventurers nervously plotting their first trip below the
surface.He introduces himself just
as they are lamenting their lack of firsthand knowledge.For a certain amount of gold, he
promises to supply a guide who speaks both Common and Aklo.Only after they’ve agreed does he
produce said guide, a particularly intelligent alpluachra, and reveal the “one
little, ahem, rider” in the contract.

Thursday, June 19, 2014

People have asked why I don’t post pictures of the monsters
I blog about.And honestly, I
sometimes wish I did—there’s no question I could triple my audience that
way.But early on I decided this
blog was going to be original content only.So unless one of you draws it or I photograph it, no dice.

The almiraj seems like a joke at first, but it’s actually
got a storied past from Islamic poetry as Al-mi’raj.And Mattias Fahlberg’s Bestiary
4 art perfectly straddles that silly/serious line as well—that bunny is one
part derp, one part “Seven gods above,
it's digging its horn into the wound!”

And did I mention it has to eat its prey—yes, it’s
carnivorous—alive, because if it
kills with its horn the corpse turns to stone?

I’m sure in most campaigns, almirajes will remain witch’s
experiments, faerie creatures, or limited to the remotest of areas.But who knows…if your campaign takes its
cues from Avatar: The Last Airbender,
The Maxx, or Wildstar (Look at me! I’m current! I have seen a trailer for a
video game!), almirajes might be as common as prairie dogs.

After Lord Bavend’s
cavaliers were routed—“by bunny rabbits,” he snorts (not having witnessed
how the acrobatic predators pogoed up the knights’ own lances), the aristocrat
swears he will have a cloak trimmed with almiraj fur and an almiraj horn dagger
to match.And whom does he send to
fetch these items, to drive the insult home to his retainers?His worst squad of irregulars, of
course: a band of novice adventurers.

Driven aboveground by
violence, a band of svirfneblin has not acclimated well to surface
life.Utterly paranoid, they plot
to kill anyone they cannot hide from. Typically this involves inviting their
quarry to take a meal with them in a nearby cavern, before releasing their pet
almiraj to deal with the guest.Whatever evidence the magical beast does not eat, the svirfneblin
quickly shatter with their heavy picks.

Any soldier at Fort
Tillman will tell you jackelopes aren’t real.But in their spare time the superstitious halberdiers skewer
almost any rabbit they can find with quarrels or musket fire.When pressed, they whisper that Jenas
Medicine, the local Proudfoot witch, swore to send her familiar after a squad who
had bullied a local weaver.The
men who laughed all wound up as stone lumps in the scrubland.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4
8

Folktales from both the American South and South America are
not my strong suit.Props to
dr-archeville and agelfeygelach for enlightening us re: the ahuizotl with healthy
doses of hags and flytraps.

My buddy Damien has been kicking around LA recently, and
recently that work has been bearing fruit.Assuming I get this up by 9 PM (Edit: Well, I almost made it), you should watch the new show he’s
been writing for, Dominion, premiering
on SyFy tonight.

Do you guys care about audiobooks?They’re how I do the majority of my “reading” lately,
because the Internet has destroyed my attention span and my bed is a sinkhole
of sleep.I don’t usually do
critiques here, because there are plenty of other spaces for that on the Net…but
sometimes a notion grabs ahold of me and won't let go until it gets expressed.

Anyway, one of the things I like to do (and am forced to do,
since I get most of my audiobooks from the library) is pick up a book from the
middle of a series.Yeah, sometimes
spoilers are a pain, but if Book X can hold me with zero introduction, I can be
confident I’ll probably like the rest of the series.In fact, I’ve discovered some of my favorite worlds that
way: White Night (#9) got me into the
Dresden Files, Black Powder War (#3)
got me into Temeraire, The Far Side of
the World got me into the Aubrey–Maturin series, and after some initial
resistance I fell for Lirael (#2) of
The Old Kingdom.

So now you know how I got into Imager’s Challenge (#2 of The Imager Portfolio) and Scholar (#4, but kicking off a new
trilogy set a hundred or so years before) by L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

There’s a lot here to recommend to a Pathfinder/D&D audience.The world’s system of imaging is
interesting—I need to go back to the first book and find out how it is
initially introduced and described, but I picked up the gist quickly enough and
found it to be a nice take on magic in a low-magic world (and one with
rudimentary gunpowder to boot). IC is also to be recommended because it
avoids the fantasy tropes of the orphan or lone wolf; Rhennthyl has a family
and a love interest, and the actual work of maintaining those relationships in
the face of adversity/adventure is very much part of the narrative.The Imager Portfolio also portrays an
interesting monotheistic religion—unusual both for the aforementioned single
deity (most fantasy novels either go for a pantheon or skip religion
altogether) and the detail with which its worship is rendered.(That said, the sheer amount of page
time it gets puts it in an awkward place—it’s too well explored not to be part
of the plot…and yet by and large the belief system offers little of relevance, at
least not in the two books I’ve listened to.)And finally and most importantly, there’s plenty of intrigue
and plotting (especially in Imager’s
Challenge) and a decent share of action.

That said, none of the above praise should be taken as an
endorsement of Modesitt as a stellar writer, because (though it pains me to say
this about a fellow Eph) he’s simply not one.

He’s got the usual problems endemic to mid-level
sci-fi/fantasy authors: character names that are unlikely strings of
letters…too many characters who exist only to let the author try out various
disquisitions on power or politics…allowing the protagonist to do ethically
questionable things but exonerating and absolving him almost immediately,
rather than to let him (and us) live with the ambiguity and consequences…just
to name a few.

He’s also got some peculiar peccadillos of his own, which,
when taken in toto, are absolutely maddening.

Modesitt does a lot of furniture moving—a term one of my
mentors used for showing exactly how a character gets from point A to B, like a
play that leaves the lights up during a scenery change instead of lifting the
lights at the start of the next scene.Modesitt has two protagonists, separated by hundreds of years, with
almost identical attitudes toward everything: politics, beer, smart women,
and especially their absolutely identical questioning—down to word choice—of whether their god, “the
Nameless,” exists (and oh, how that questioning is repeated…and repeated…and
repeated).He is obsessed with
food.He is entranced by the
routine of bureaucracies and especially police and military structure.

Modesitt also insists on describing every room a character enters, no matter how consequential or
incidental to the plot, as if he wanted the reader to draft it on graph paper: the
exact dimensions in yards, the location of the window casements, the light
sources, and the placement of significant objects, with speculation on their
use.This fetish for exactitude
goes the other way, unfortunately, if Modesitt’s protagonists cannot be sure of
something; then the narrative is overrun with qualifiers: “it seemed to,” “but
he couldn’t be sure,” “most likely,” “apparently.”Seriously, just this morning I encountered a description of
Quaeryt going to visit an official (forgive the paraphrase, but I’m not far
off) who was located “under a tarp, or perhaps a tent with its sides rolled
up”—because that distinction and the uncertainty it represents is apparently crucial.

Most damning, for me anyway, is that Modesitt is utterly incapable of having a character go to a
restaurant and not play out the entire
exchange between him and the waitress—from picking the table to taking the
drink order (always lager) to choosing an item off the menu.This is a ritual that is fascinating to
literally no one who has ever been in
a restaurant where the silverware is already on the table when you sit
down.Yet Modesitt doesn't trim or
condense a syllable, not once in either book.And given the urban settings, these characters eat out.All.The.Time.

I’ve done some browsing, and Modesitt gets a lot of praise
on the Web for his realism.But
this isn't realism—no character or observer catalogs every room in terms of
square yardage and compass points in exactly the same cadence every time.You can be obsessed with food and
fabrics—Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Legacy series might as well be a medieval
Prada catalog—or the minutia of military life—look at the naval porn that is
Patrick O’Brian’s work—but in those works the authors let their descriptions
expand and contract to the needs of the characters and the plot.For them, an antechamber is an
undescribed antechamber, unless describing its dimensions offers clues that a
character is being insulted by being forced to wait there, or to highlight her
inability to hide if the wrong person finds her there.Not all rooms, meals, and encounters
deserve equal weight.

Maybe in print, these flaws aren't readily apparent.But that’s the joy and the curse of an
audiobook: Brilliance is magnified; insufficiencies blare like a siren.(I suspect, though I cannot prove this,
that it also points to the lack of resources publishers have in a post-Amazon
world—an editor with more time on his or her plate could have (hopefully)
helped Modesitt to recognize and excise these tendencies long ago.)And they're flaws that should be
absolutely unacceptable in an author with more than 50 novels to his credit.

The thing is…I like these books.At least well enough to listen to and get more from the
library.I’m engaged!I’m putting them on my iPod as I go
walking, and the intrigue and narrative pull is worth at least an extra half-mile.And it's that disconnect between the
pull of the story and the pall of the storytelling that has me so fascinated. If you’re looking for
Renaissance/Enlightenment-ish low-magic fantasy with a dash of espionage, this
is a series very much worth exploring.But go in with your eyes (and ears)
open, and don't be afraid to slide the book, respectfully but firmly, back upon
the shelf.

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Don't you just hate it when your dog marks his territory by
calling up a polar vortex via control
weather?Or how every time you
try to give him a bath, he spontaneously turns into 6-ton killer whale?

No?Your dog
doesn’t do that?Ever?Huh.Weird.

Move over owlbear…we’ve got a wolforca!By which I mean the akhlut, of
course.Which would be tempting to
make fun of, except 18 Hit Dice, Huge size, and a swallow whole attack that
does bludgeoning and cold damage have
a way of commanding respect.Plus,
the akhlut comes from Inuit myths, so it has a pedigree we can respect.Besides, how can you not love a
creature that creates entire storms on a daily basis just to mark its
territory?And the spectacle of a
killer whale storming onto shore as a Huge wolf and completing its charge in
the following round (with a +8 initiative bonus) is too cinematic for
words.

I’m guessing locals would regard akhluts as practically
divine beings, given their storm calling ability—perhaps even as protectors, since
they drive predators like winter wolves, sharks, and frost worms away.Of course, how they go about avoiding
or placating such a beast might have nasty ramifications for PCs…

Whalers become the
hunted when an iceberg sinks their ship and their lifeboats are set upon by
killer whales.Adventurers
hitching a ride with the whalers have just helped get one of the boats ashore
when a killer whale bursts out of the water and becomes a giant wolf right
before their very eyes…

The We Shu folk
regard cetaceals and akhluts as two sides of the same coin, the yin and
yang of the sea.Some clans even
take to revering one or the other as totem spirits.Those that respect the akhlut celebrate storms, prefer to
hunt or fish to tending any crops, and often engineer “accidents” to happen to
strangers so that their akhlut totem animal remains well fed.

When the low-lying
Yangmarahji Jungle floods after the monsoon season, the forest floor
becomes one giant estuary.Bull
sharks, giant crabs, and river dolphins with fierce underbites swim between the
trees as if they were born there.But the Yangmarahji is a darkly magical place, and some of those
dolphins have settled in the jungle for good.When the waters recede, the giant river dolphins take the
forms of wolves or boars and continue hunting.This causes little trouble for the area’s flying apes, the
derhii, but other travelers might not be so lucky.(These tropical akhlut are partly responsible for the jungle’s
rainy climate even during the dry season, and they are immune to the effects of
silt, quicksand, or sinkholes.)

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3
11

After Friday’s post, knightdisciple analyzed Agyra in a way
that put my reading to shame.Some
highlights:

One thing that comes
to mind is that the multiple heads and breathing lightning, as well as a big
tail whipping all over the place, also reminds me of King Ghidorah. Which makes
this a three-for-one Kaiju special!

See, this is the kind of expert testimony a Toro newb like
me can't deliver!Then he dug deep
into the stats:

No matter what, while
Agyra’s not overly talkative (Int 3), it/she is scary good at intuiting motive
(Wisdom 29!).

A great point, and this calls to mind the Zillo Beast from
Season Two of Star Wars: The Clone Wars.The Zillo Beast wasn’t much of a
planner or thinker, reacting primarily to stimuli.But it had an uncanny ability to sense motive, able to
immediately identify Chancellor Palpatine—a Sith Lord canny enough to be able
to act right under Yoda’s nose, no
less—as a malevolent threat and the source of suffering to be extinguished.

And, of course:

I will say the Pacific
Rim Fanboy in me wants to say there’s a monster of some sort, like, a golem or
something, that PCs can control that’s at least of a size with Kaiju.
Alternatively, maybe crafting such a defensive artifact is the culmination of a
Kaiju-centric campaign!

*Forehead slam*Why did I not think of that?!?My helm is off to you,
knightdisciple.And for you and
all the other PR fanfolk out there, there’s an old Companion-level D&D
adventure you have to check out: Earthshaker by David “Zeb” Cook.I’ve never read it, but I know it
features an adventure inside one such
gnome-constructed mecha.And if
you want your mecha to fight other mechas, The
Book of Wondrous Inventions, edited by Bruce A. Heard, reveals the Alphatian
and Glantrian answer to the Earthshaker in the form of a transforming golem,
Jaggar’s Transforming Gargantoid. Happy hunting for both books!

Finally, regarding yesterday’s post…who am I kidding?Anyone who has seen even one of my
character sheets knows I would read the hell out of Elves of Golarion III, IV, L, or whatever.Once you go elf, other races go on the
shelf.

By the way, please forgive the occasional typos. I am aware of them, but disagreements between MS Word and the Blogger template make my entries nearly impossible to edit once posted. I blame gremlins. You can find a more polished version of this blog over on Tumblr.